| Allmusic |
 Beginning with the lyrics "Well hello again my weed smoking friends," Devin the Dude's fifth album -- and his first for the Razor & Tie label -- is more of the same; chilled out weed and women anthems with plenty of cool funk productions. Maybe that sounds like an everyday Afroman, but for the uninitiated, Devin's skills are light years ahead of the stoner-rap competition with much more clever rhymes, an irresistible slacker flow, plus a rock-solid commitment to quality control that makes every release desirable, even when it's been there, done that. As slight as they are, Landing Gear's identifying features are the softer, more polished productions along with the superstar guest appearance from Snoop Dogg who goes puff for puff with Devin on the pimp-walking highlight "I Don't Chase 'Em." The heartbroken and hazy "Thinkin' Boutchu" offers the killer "You've just to get out of my mind/As the old school cassette rewinds/Time will reveal if we can make it last forever/You stole my heart but made it tougher than leather," but most of Devin's dealings with women are much more like Snoop's and will drive away those easily offended (plug the title "El Grande Nalgas" into your Babel Fish for proof). Devin's target audience, on the other hand, embraces sleaze, porno, weed, and hip-hop with plenty of memorable stingers, and seeing as how Landing Gear delivers on all counts, fans of Texas' most blunted rapper will once again be pleased....full text |
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| Nymag |
In 2008, hip-hop drank the Kool-Aid, and it was mixed with cough syrup: Lil Wayne’s just one of many southern rappers with a weakness for “sizurp”—the homemade cocktail that draws its narcotic strength from prescription-strength cough medicine—but it was his woozy blockbuster album, Tha Carter III, that redefined rap’s outer limits.
If it’s now Lil Wayne’s world and other rappers are just adapting to the atmosphere, that suits Devin the Dude just fine. He might come from Houston, where sipping sizurp is a way of life, but Devin Copeland is no trippy visionary. Nor is he a hyperambitious striver like most other emcees. On the lush, laid-back Landing Gear, his first album with the rock-centric Razor & Tie, he makes zero effort to break into radio—he has never had a hit song—or even expand his loyal fan base. This is unapologetic stoner music, uniformly midtempo, evocative, if anything, of the P-Funk–influenced West Coast rap of the nineties. There are no state-of-the-art flourishes (like Kanye West’s sped-up soul samples); he furnishes most of his own hooks, without the assistance of Auto-Tune, the now ubiquitous vocal effect favored by rappers who can’t really sing (Devin sings, and quite nicely too); and the only big-name rapper he invites is Snoop Dogg, with whom he shares some genuine stoner chemistry. Track after track (there are only twelve, and mercifully no skits), the beats land just so. And nowhere is he more confident than in his rhymes. Because “Highway,” for instance, is about life as a rapper, he plays hopscotch on the beat—and manages to sound perfectly conversational doing it....full text |
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| Avclub |
| Devin The Dude solo albums tend to fall into two categories: instant classics that immediately announce their all-consuming awesomeness (2002's Just Tryin' Ta Live, 2007's Waitin' To Inhale) and sleepers that only reveal the full scope of their greatness after repeat listens, like Devin's classic 1998 debut The Dude and 2004's To Tha X-Treme. So it's tempting to give one of rap's most consistent, dependable figures the benefit of the doubt and assume that his new album, Landing Gear, his first since he parted ways with longtime home Rap-A-Lot, will improve with time, because on the surface it's easily Devin's weakest effort....full text |
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